(A version of this appeared in Newsday’s Opinion pages)
Here comes another Super Bowl, our 21st-Century version of Christians vs. lions. And I am wondering, in spite of its enormous popularity—more than 50,000 spectators attending gladiatorial games at the Colosseum back when everyone used Roman numerals—did the whole Christians-lions thing end because they ran out of Christians?
What if the National Football League, the bread and circuses of our modern culture, were to run out of players? Is there any chance that increased awareness of participants’ brain damage, something we’ve been reading about for more than a decade, will multiply the number of liability suits, gradually scare off insurance companies, advertisers, schools and colleges—not to mention parents of potential kiddie footballers—in a domino effect that eventually would dry up the NFL’s feeder system? Putting football (like democracy?) on a slow-motion decline into oblivion.
Silly, no?
The Super Bowl, and football in general, remain our most popular form of escapist entertainment. Of the 100 most-watched telecasts in 2021, 75 were NFL games. The NFL’s annual revenue, which has topped $15 billion a year, is roughly four times what it was at the beginning of the century. The league’s new 11-year deal with media partners is valued at $110 billion. We clearly love the spectacle.
Yet the sport’s barbaric nature is progressively more obvious with the accumulating reports of CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease associated with repeated blows to the head.
After the 2005 publication of forensic neuropathologist Bennet Omalu’s 2002 discovery of CTE in the brain of late Pittsburgh Steeler Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, there was a 37.8 percent drop in tackle football participation among all ages—from 8.4 million to 5.22 million—over the next 12 years.
In 2015, when a medical study revealed increased risk of memory problems for kids who played tackle football prior to age 12, the NFL took evasive action by backing nationwide Mom Clinics, meant to convince parents about the safety of having their tykes—as young as 5—cracking heads in youth leagues. To keep the supply of gridders coming.
But news of middle- and high-school teams being suspended has spread across the nation—sometimes due directly to heath concerns, often because there no longer were enough children willing to play.
The NFL, which initially dismissed Omalu’s findings, at last established a concussion protocol and instituted penalties for intentional head-to-head blows it calls “targeting.” But Omalu continued to argue that brain damage isn’t strictly from clinically diagnosed concussions and that safety measures such as improved helmets “don’t stop the brain from bumping around in the skull. We have to take the head out of the game.”
According to Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist and director of the CTE Center at Boston University, the disease now has been found in the brains of more than 315 former NFL players—including 24 who died in their 20s and 30s, several of whom committed suicide. The most recent was 32-year-old Phillip Adams, who last April shot and killed six people in a violent rampage in South Carolina before killing himself.
That’s a lot more unsettling than watching Giants quarterback Daniel Jones, earlier this season, emerging from a tackle rubber-legged, with little imaginary birds twirling around his helmet. Or Arizona defender Budda Baker being carted off the field on a stretcher after a violent collision during a recent playoff game.
Though CTE is detectable only in posthumous examinations, researchers are concerned about the cognitive fog and erratic and impulsive behavior in the disease’s potential victims. So when Tampa Bay receiver Antonio Brown bizarrely stripped off his equipment and walked off the field, mid-game, against the Jets last month, BU’s CTE Center co-founder Dr. Chris Nowinski acknowledged in an online post, “Like you, I wonder if Antonio Brown’s behavior is caused by CTE.”
We will only know if his brain is examined after he is dead. When it is too late.